


Perfect in Their Imperfections

by nox_candida



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Christmas, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Sherlockmas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-06
Updated: 2012-01-06
Packaged: 2017-10-29 01:15:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/314231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nox_candida/pseuds/nox_candida
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The evidence was clearly pointing to one conclusion, but it was a conclusion that John was having trouble imaging.  Because trying to picture Sherlock Holmes decorating their flat in a possible fit of either Christmas cheer or sentimentalism was nearly impossible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perfect in Their Imperfections

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for a person who withdrew from the exchange, this fic was given as a gift to the community. So many thanks to mitsuruaki for looking this over and to ellieet and melaszka for dropping everything to Britpick.

A long day at the surgery--made even longer by a night of chasing a serial killer through London--left John barely able to climb the steps of 221B Baker Street in the hour just before dawn of Christmas Day.

Perhaps it was the exhaustion brought on by a night without sleep, but it took him an almost embarrassing amount of time to realise the flat had changed dramatically since the last time he’d been there hours earlier.

The changes were _not_ for the better.

“What—” he started to exclaim, lost for words, but the stiffness in Sherlock’s shoulders and the carefully blank expression on his face forced John’s brain to engage and discard any number of things he might have said. So instead of the shocked _What the hell?_ or the horrified _What the fuck is this?_ that threatened, he trailed off and took in the extent of the disaster.

The flat was even messier, more cluttered—more of an utter tip than usual. In the corner where his chair usually sat was what appeared to have once been a Christmas tree. The only reason he could tell was because of the fairy lights decorating it, the “ornaments”—apparently crafted from whatever had been at hand, given that they seemed to consist largely of test tubes and microscope slides—hanging from the bare branches, and the explosion of needles on the floor in a disturbingly wide arc. It did not look dissimilar from the aftermath of a landmine, which did not bear thinking about.

John’s vision passed briefly over the fireplace, with the embers from a recent fire—and thank God the entire flat hadn’t burned down, _Christ_ —and their chairs to come to rest on the sofa. Which, inexplicably, was decorated with fairy lights and needles. John forbore commenting on this—because why would someone decorate the _sofa_ with fairy lights?—and glanced around the remainder of the room. The windows were also outlined with fairy lights and holly for some reason.

In fact, he was starting to suspect that reason was standing next to him, holding himself stiffly and almost hesitantly. John would have looked his way, but the sudden intrusion of Christmas-related paraphernalia into their flat—done in the haphazard way it had been—was like seeing a Christmas themed train wreck. He simply couldn’t look away.

What made the whole thing all the more bizarre was that it looked layered on top of the usual mess of experiments, papers, books, and _things_ that typically cluttered their flat, a thin layer of Christmassy paint over wallpaper. Or, perhaps a more fitting analogy would be a Christmas dirty bomb that had exploded out from the location of the aforementioned Christmas tree.

And that was to say nothing of the smell.

John sniffed carefully, but there was no mistaking the smell of burnt meat. With dread in the pit of his stomach, he took a few steps towards the kitchen to get a better look inside.

In contrast to the living room, the kitchen had been scrupulously cleaned of the experiments that had—when he’d left for work the day before—taken up nearly every bit of table and worktop space. All that had been left behind were highly suspicious scorch marks near the oven and on the kitchen table, as well as what looked—at first glance—to be homemade Christmas crackers. They looked very much like the shop-bought kind, with the notable exception of the paper which was creased and crumpled and had singe marks on it. They also seemed much larger than the ones he typically saw in shops.

He avoided thinking too hard about the singeing and instead looked at the wall behind the oven. That, at the very least, seemed perfectly straightforward, if not very encouraging. Clearly, someone had been cooking meat and had charred it. The explanation of _why_ , however, was still somewhat mystifying.

Or not. The evidence was clearly pointing to one conclusion, but it was a conclusion that John was having trouble imaging. Because trying to picture Sherlock Holmes decorating their flat in a possible fit of either Christmas cheer or sentimentalism was nearly impossible. It just did not compute. At all. John felt that he’d experienced Sherlock in more moods and frames of mind than almost anyone else on the planet and nowhere in his experience did this fit with Sherlock Holmes as John knew him.

Then again, Sherlock had a penchant for surprising him, a penchant that had started the day they’d met and hadn’t diminished since.

But he was still at a loss to explain this particular surprise, so he turned to the man himself. The man who was looking at John as any other man might a suspicious package in the post or a wild animal in a cage.

“What…happened?” he managed to say, admirably refraining from pointing out the obvious.

Given the look he received in return—one that managed to contain both haughty disdain and apprehension—he hadn’t succeeded. “I would have thought that would have been obvious,” Sherlock answered coolly after a long pause.

John might have been fooled by Sherlock’s nonchalance if he weren’t intimately familiar with the way that nonchalance usually sat on the detective’s features. It looked almost nothing like the expression currently on the man’s face.

“It’s not, actually,” he said. “I’m not at all sure what…happened,” he said. “Which is why I asked.” He managed to stop himself before he asked what Sherlock had been thinking because, even at the best of times, what went through Sherlock’s head tended to confuse him. That, or gave him a splitting headache, depending on the subject.

He had a feeling that this explanation was going to veer into migraine territory.

What really gave Sherlock’s apprehension away was how he kept his face blank—as though he were studying something mildly unappealing—along with the way his hands were very carefully relaxed at his sides. Those two cues, in addition to the fact that Sherlock was still wearing his long coat—which John always privately thought of as Sherlock’s armour—were far more telling than anything that was coming out of Sherlock’s mouth.

Sherlock huffed and turned away from John, striding into the living room and falling gracefully onto the couch before turning over so that John had a lovely view of Sherlock’s back, which was still wrapped in his coat.

John waited, despite his exhaustion. He had more patience when it came to this game than Sherlock, and it was one of only a few areas where he regularly bested Sherlock Holmes.

Sure enough, Sherlock reacted first. “What?” he snapped at John, face still turned towards the back of the sofa.

“I asked you a question,” John responded patiently. “It wasn’t rhetorical,” he added, and received a derisive snort for his trouble. He was so used to Sherlock disparaging his intelligence, though, that he hardly noticed.

He waited a bit longer and was rewarded when Sherlock suddenly sat up and whirled to face him. His cheeks were pink, but his mouth was twisted in disgust. “Very well,” he said nastily, “since you’re too slow to work it out for yourself, it falls on me to enlighten you.”

John nodded and sat in his chair, pointedly ignoring Sherlock’s attempts to engage him in a fight to distract him. The new location of the chair—moved to give room to the “tree”—put him within arm’s reach of Sherlock who hadn’t moved from the sofa.

“Fine,” Sherlock sniffed. “I put some decorations up.”

John blinked at him when it became clear that Sherlock had no intention of going on. “I did work that much out,” he said, slightly impatiently. “I was more interested in _why_ , and how it came to look…” a number of adjectives raced through his brain, but he ultimately settled on, “like this.”

Sherlock glared at him, but John just looked steadily back. Waiting.

“Oh very well,” Sherlock grit out, his hands clenching in his lap momentarily before he seemed to consciously unfurl them and pressed them together. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

 _It certainly is that_ danced on the tip of John’s tongue, but Sherlock would not take it as a compliment, which would have been an incorrect interpretation in any case. “Why?” he asked instead.

Sherlock was not looking at him, instead appearing to glance around the room and take it in as he might a crime scene. “My research indicated that most ordinary people enjoy such decorations at this time of year, despite the historical inaccuracies of such decorations and the creeping influence of American modes of celebration.” This last was said with a pointed look of disgust at the flashing fairy lights.

John paused to stare at his flatmate and partner, carefully translating from the original Sherlockian to Standard English. “Was this for my benefit?” he hazarded after a moment, still not completely sure he’d parsed Sherlock’s meaning correctly.

Sherlock set his jaw and refused to look at him, which was answer enough.

John cleared his throat and said carefully, “Why don’t you take me through it from the beginning? You said you did research into the topic?” Which begged the question of why Sherlock had deemed it necessary to research in the first place. John had never inquired into Sherlock’s childhood—his reaction to his own brother was enough of a clue that it was a sensitive and fraught topic—but he’d always thought that it must have been unusual and difficult. This was yet more evidence to that conclusion, but was rather beside the point at the moment.

“Yes,” Sherlock answered after a moment, still not looking at him. “According to various sources, the typical English Christmas in broad terms involves decorations, food, presents, and snowy weather.” Sherlock took a moment to glare out of the window, probably at the decided lack of snow. “As you were born and passed most of your childhood in an average English household in Essex, I gathered that my research would approximate your individual Christmas experience closely enough.”

John stared at Sherlock, shocked. “You wanted to surprise me with a traditional English Christmas? With a Christmas tree and fairy lights and roast turkey and Christmas crackers?”

“And presents and snow,” Sherlock added, before clamping his lips shut.

“And presents and snow,” John echoed, still staring at his partner. Really, if that had been his motivation, he’d…well. He obviously hadn’t deduced very much about John’s family, because he forgot to include the part where his father drank too much spiked cider and his mother cried into the Christmas cake every year, and Harry found excuse after excuse to be out of the house, leaving John to deal with the shambles that was his family life.

It had been a relief once he’d become a doctor; it hadn’t looked suspicious when, as the new bloke, he’d been forced to work in A&E on Christmas and Boxing Day. And it was an even bigger relief when he’d gone into the army. After all, when he’d been posted overseas, he’d had a very legitimate excuse to not experience another family Christmas.

“So,” he said, shaking himself from his own increasingly maudlin reminiscence and reaching out to gently pat Sherlock’s knee, “you did research into a traditional English Christmas. Um, for me. What happened next?”

Sherlock’s attention was on John’s hand—still resting lightly on his knee—before sighing, some of the tension bleeding out of him. “I started with the tree,” he said quietly. “My research led me to select a Noble Fir as the type of tree I would purchase.”

John glanced instinctively at the tree, which did not appear to be a Fir tree at all.

“Unfortunately, some legwork indicated that most of the remaining available trees were different varieties of Spruce, which are less suited for holding onto their needles and are generally less fragrant and pleasant to touch,” he continued, sounding bitter. “I was forced to choose _Picea abies_ , the Norway or European Spruce. As you can see, the process of bringing the tree in and attempting to decorate it with ornaments and fairy lights has proven how ill-suited it is as a Christmas tree.”

John nodded, not trusting himself to vocalise his thoughts on the suitability of Spruce trees, nor his opinion on their needles and the effort he would no-doubt have to expend to clean them up. “About the decorations…” he said instead, and was grateful when Sherlock started speaking so he wasn’t forced to complete that thought.

“My understanding was that inappropriately named fairy lights are found to be attractive and considered standard decoration not only on the tree, but also around the flat.” He turned to look at John, a fierce expression on his face. “I refuse to put them on the outside, however.”

John smiled a bit and nodded, giving Sherlock’s knee a bit of a squeeze. “Of course.”

Sherlock seemed to accept this and relaxed a bit further. “I was unable to work out the most typical means of displaying these decorations about the flat and on the tree, so I was forced to use a layout of my own design. Given the dimensions of the flat and the amount of shelving, I was able to work the lights around the room in a manner designed to draw the eye.”

It did do that, John thought. It drew the eye before forcing it away lest it cause any lasting retina damage. He cleared his throat and looked at Sherlock encouragingly. “What next?”

Sherlock looked away again, towards the kitchen. “I began working on the food.”

“You cooked?” John asked in surprise and then immediately kicked himself for it as soon as the words were out of mouth. Of course Sherlock had—he’d seen the unfortunate scorch marks, after all. It was just so surprising, given that Sherlock had never cooked in the time that John had known him. Not once.

“It’s simple chemistry,” Sherlock snapped defensively.

“They why…” John began.

“Mrs Hudson provided the recipes for roast turkey, roast potatoes, chipolatas, and stuffing. I deemed a recipe for cooking veg unnecessary, and procured a recipe for Christmas pudding from the internet.”

John had an unpleasant mental image of Sherlock lighting the pudding on fire before he took a deep breath and willed it away. “Then what?” he asked.

“I prepared the pudding some weeks ago while you were at the surgery.”

“Really?” John asked, stunned. Sherlock really had attempted to go all out.

Sherlock sent him a Look, as he often did when John asked questions—no matter how rhetorical—which seemed to ask for clarification. “It was not difficult, John,” he said. “But I needed to test which brandy was best to use for the pudding.”

“Oh God, that was just an excuse to light them on fire, wasn’t it?”

Sherlock ignored him, which meant that John was right. He groaned to himself as Sherlock went on. “Of course, I needed a variety of brandies to determine which one complemented the pudding best and lit at the correct temperature.”

“And got carried away and forgot about the turkey you were roasting,” John finished for him, because he knew from plenty of experience how wrapped up Sherlock could get in his experiments.

“Unfortunately, the fire brigade was called in—not by me,” Sherlock interjected, seeing the look of dawning horror on John’s face. “Mrs Hudson smelled…burning and reacted prematurely to a situation I had completely under control.”

There were so many things wrong with all of that that John didn’t know where to begin. Or even if he should. Actually, now that he thought about it, probably better to gloss over that as well.

“So, they turned up…” he said, doing his best not to wince at the thought.

“Yes, although I’m afraid I ignored most of what they had to say. The turkey was the only casualty, of course, but being rather unintelligent, they insisted on attempting to lecture me.”

John could well imagine how badly that conversation went; truly provoked, Sherlock could be absolutely brutal when he felt it necessary. Judging from how dismissive Sherlock was of the whole thing, though, he probably hadn’t cared enough to verbally eviscerate anyone, for which John was truly thankful.

“On top of everything else, the weather refused to cooperate,” Sherlock added, another nasty glare reserved for the weather that was stubbornly refusing to turn snowy. John suspected that mentioning that London hardly ever received snow for Christmas would do no good.

Instead, he cleared his throat. “Thank you,” he said sincerely.

Clearly, the power to surprise worked both ways, as Sherlock whipped his head around to look at John for the first time in quite a while. “For what?”

“For all of this,” he said, waving his hand around to include the entirety of their flat. “It wasn’t necessary, you know, but I appreciate that you did it for me.”

Sherlock frowned, but John couldn’t help thinking that he looked rather pleased. Or, at least, relieved. “You’re thanking me, even though it didn’t turn out as it should?”

John shrugged, a small smile on his lips. “They don’t, most of the time, you know. It’s practically a rule that at least one thing goes wrong.”

“Are you trying to say that imperfection is normal?” Sherlock asked, somewhat suspiciously.

“No, not exactly,” John said, a tad more hastily than he wanted to. “It’s just that…this is more in line with the Christmas spirit.” At Sherlock’s blank look, John elaborated. “The motivation behind the effort is more important than the effort itself.”

“You…don’t mind the result because you appreciate the intent,” Sherlock stated, looking at John intently.

“Yeah.”

Sherlock stared at him for a long time, processing, so John took that opportunity to look around carefully at the decorations and spotted something that Sherlock _had_ got right.

“You will probably not feel that way about it tomorrow,” Sherlock intoned, just as John looked back at him to comment on the decoration above the doorway.

“Of course I will,” John said firmly, looking him in the eye. “It came from you, didn’t it?”

Sherlock appeared at a loss how to respond, which was fine.

“Besides,” John said, reaching for Sherlock’s hand as he stood, “you did get one thing perfectly right.”

“What?” Sherlock asked hesitantly as John dragged him to his feet and pulled him over to the doorway.

“This,” he said simply, pointing to the mistletoe that hung above the door. And, currently, over their heads.

“Ah,” Sherlock said, looking nonplussed. “ _Viscum album_. My research indicated that it’s a popular decoration around this time, but I was unsure why a plant that is poisonous and causes acute gastrointestinal problems would carry such significance—”

“Allow me to demonstrate,” John said with a smile, and cut off Sherlock’s further thoughts on mistletoe by reaching up to kiss him gently.

Sherlock leaned into the kiss, deepening it and cupping John’s face in his large, warm hands before John pulled away and smiled up at him. “Happy Christmas.”

“Happy Christmas,” Sherlock answered quietly.

John beamed and leaned in to kiss him again. Maybe he would be unhappy about the sheer amounts of clean up later—much later, if Sherlock’s hands roaming over his body were any indication. But at the moment, he was content. He’d meant what he said, after all; the decorations, the attempt at cooking, even staying up until all hours of the morning trailing behind the detective…they were all perfect in their imperfections. Just as Sherlock himself was, and John wouldn’t have it any other way.

A very Happy Christmas indeed.


End file.
